FBI Director Robert
Mueller on Wednesday defended his bureau's handling of the Christmas
airline bombing attempt, insisting agents in Detroit moved quickly to
protect lives. The suspect, he added, has been cooperating after his
arrest.

Mueller testified before told a House Appropriations
subcommittee that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has been cooperating with
agents. Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, is accused of trying to detonate a
bomb hidden in his underwear on a flight from Amsterdam.

The Obama
administration has come under attack from Republicans over the case.
GOP lawmakers contend the suspect should have been placed in military
custody as a terrorist, and not advised of his right to remain silent
under U.S. law.

Mueller said that following Abdulmutallab's arrest
and first court appearance he has been cooperating, in part because his
family persuaded him to do so.

The federal defender office in
Detroit, which is representing Abdulmutallab, had no immediate comment.

Rep.
Frank Wolf, R-Va., said he would like to have seen a separate team of
interrogation experts brought into Detroit to handle the questioning,
rather than the local terrorism task force agents.

"They were not
the best people that we had in the nation at that time to interrogate
the Christmas Day bomber," Wolf said.

Mueller defended the actions
of the investigators who responded to the attempt. He said that to have
waited for an out-of-town expert to fly into Detroit on Christmas would
have lost a valuable opportunity to get intelligence information.

"One
has to make decisions relatively quickly in order to maximize the
opportunity to get that intelligence," Mueller said.

Senior
administration officials insist they obtained valuable intelligence in
the first day's questioning of the suspect. Republicans have charged
that the Obama administration, by keeping him in the criminal justice
system, missed an opportunity to get more information by transferring
him to military custody.

The Christmas terror case has already
altered U.S. policy in a number of areas: The U.S. tightened air
screening measures, suspended transfers of Guantanamo detainees to
Yemen, where the suspect was allegedly trained, and a revamped
information-sharing among counterintelligence analysts.